In recent years, facsimile machines, personal computers, modems, telephone sets and other terminal equipment have been introduced in enormous numbers in office buildings and homes. These terminal equipment, also known as customer premises equipment (CPEs), generally use an existing local carrier network for data transmission through a central telephone switching office.
In order to carry on wider communication involving these and other CPEs, multi-service networks have been implemented. In existing multi-service networks, the CPEs are connected at the respective customer premise to access devices, which are in turn connected to the central telephone switching office. The access devices then can communicate voice, data, and video traffic between the CPEs and the broader network.
However, the existing multi-service networks do not have the ability to packetize various customer traffic at the customer's location and communicate the traffic over network. Furthermore, the existing multi-service networks use access and switching devices to implement multiple services, thereby making these systems costly.